Logline
A device gruesomely emerges from an insomniac alcoholic hacker, igniting an absurdist cyberpunk nightmare that uncovers a conspiracy, questions her identity and jeopardizes her life.
Synopsis
Harmony is a lone-wolf anarchist hacker living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Insomniac, alcoholic, and deeply suspicious of a world increasingly obsessed with optimizing women out of existence. She has built her life around distrust and the illusion of control. Then a cheap, obsolete medical device gruesomely emerges from her body, fries all of her electronics and leaves her with questions she cannot ignore: what was it doing inside her, and who put it there?
Stripped of her technological armor, Harmony is forced into the streets of Greenpoint to find answers. Her only ally is Switch, her oldest friend who is on the verge of abandoning Brooklyn for suburban domesticity and a fiancé who represents everything Harmony distrusts. But when a Chinatown fortune teller leads Harmony back to Switch and the clues she’d been holding, she realizes Switch may still be looking out for her, in her own way.
The investigation leads Harmony to Moe; a jaded, underplaying tech savant running a dusty computer store in Greenpoint whose encyclopedic knowledge of obsolete systems proves unexpectedly useful. What Harmony doesn’t know is that Moe was one of the original architects of the device’s programming and recognized it from the moment he saw it. His guilt becomes the film’s most complicated moral thread.
At the murky riverbanks of the Newtown Creek, Moe shows Harmony where he has previously scavenged a device similar to hers. There, using his handcrafted tech, they detect a covert radio signal emanating from nearby towering industrial structures looming above that Harmony affectionately calls the “Metal Testicles”. This reveals that the conspiracy has been hiding in plain sight, embedded in the local infrastructure all along.
As Harmony digs deeper into the conspiracy and the company behind the device: “Hera Tech”: a women’s health technology company whose wellness products are more sinister than their clinical branding suggests, she becomes a target. Jack, a wealthy predator whose Bitcoin wallet Harmony had previously hacked, resurfaces at a moment of vulnerability and poses the film’s most visceral threat. It is Switch who saves her and finally cracks open the emotional armor Harmony has spent years constructing.
In a final act of solidarity, Switch reveals she had her own device removed years ago and threw it into Newtown Creek. Together they stand by the edge of the most polluted waterway in America as Harmony releases herself from the burden of the nightmare she’s just endured with this device, plunging it into the murky waters, laying it to rest alongside everything else the neighborhood has been asked to absorb and forget.
The Device ends not in triumph but in awareness. Harmony, Switch and Moe come to understand that they cannot topple Hera-Tech. But knowledge is power, and what they can do now is make their own choice to stay: in Brooklyn, in the cracks, in their lives, in their refusal. Using the little they have to continue to fight against a system that was never designed with them in mind. The choice is the victory.
Director’s Statement
The concept for this film came to me in a dream. Or was it a nightmare? I sometimes have a hard time distinguishing imagined experiences from an increasingly surreal reality, but who can blame me? Our world is objectively absurd.
Bodily autonomy, for women especially, feels disturbingly passé in 2026. Perhaps that’s what my subconscious was processing when I dreamed of a strange medical device ejecting from my face in a violent sneezing fit: a grotesque metaphor for control, intrusion, and the quiet theft of self-hood. Those feelings; of being undermined, unsafe, betrayed by systems that claim to protect us, have plagued me for as long as I can remember. This film is my way of excavating them, confronting them, and illustrating the invisible forces that shape our lives without consent. The foreign body inside Harmony monitors her vitals, regulates her behavior, and inexplicably connects her to other women. All, apparently, for her own good?
I have spent the past thirteen years making Brooklyn my home: walking these streets, breathing this air, making my morning pilgrimage to the Newtown Creek before the neighborhood wakes up. The scrap piles, wastewater plant and dive bars are fixtures of my daily life and where I do my best thinking. Harmony’s world is an off-kilter, skewed version of the real, present-day Greenpoint, as seen through my eyes. The film’s themes are not abstract to me, they echo my real life.
In many ways, Harmony is me. In the short film I cast myself – a decision born of practicality for the short and not one I plan to repeat for the feature, but it just made sense. Harmony’s identity matches my own not just logistically, but ideologically. Her distrust of systems, dark humor as survival mechanism, an apartment built for control, lingering suspicion that her body is not her own. Most of Harmony’s traits are my own, just heightened.
With my small crew of highly skilled professionals who have all experienced some level of betrayal and apathy from the film industry in the past few years, I hope to bring back a punk-rock, guerrilla style energy to local, grass-roots, independent film-making. We’ll take to the streets with minimal crew and use natural light where we can.
The proof of concept short film is already in production. Shot guerrilla-style in the streets, bars, and waterways of Greenpoint with a skeleton crew. Producer Joseph Mastantuono and cinematographer Damien Paris bring significant independent film experience to the project, and together we are developing The Device as a micro-budget feature that leverages our deep familiarity with the locations, the community, and each other.
The Hera-Tech world is already alive beyond the script. We’ve already launched a real marketing campaign, complete with printed stickers containing a QR code placed in Greenpoint dive bar bathrooms that link to the live website and Instagram account. The commercial for their latest product; the “Luna” (a sleep-tracking earring that features in the short film) is already live and people are asking me questions about it. “Is this a real product?” “How are you involved with this tech company?” We have been seeding the film’s mythology in the real world before a single frame of the feature is shot. This is not a film waiting to be made. It is already happening.
Our protagonist is a 36 year-old razor-sharp, self-sabotaging lone-wolf tech savant. Insomniac, alcoholic, cynic, detective, a lifelong outsider, unknowingly raised under the invisible influence of government-issued experimental tech.
She’s built her personality around distrust; of people, systems, intimacy. Harmony masks her vulnerability with deadpan wit and a working-class Brooklyn toughness that keeps everyone at arm’s length.
Operating in the shadows as a “digital anarchist”, lately her confidence has been slowly eroded by strange “episodes”, fragmented memories, and a nagging, paranoid sense of being observed. Harmony has lived with the lingering suspicion that her thoughts aren’t entirely her own; a fear that is confirmed when a mysterious device violently ejects itself from her body.
As she navigates a labyrinth of conspiracy, betrayal, and ghosts of her past, Harmony’s greatest enemy isn’t the surveillance state, it’s the version of herself engineered by it. Her arc is a struggle to reclaim autonomy, confront the truth of her origins, and decide if she can trust anyone enough to let them help her, or if staying alone in the shadows is the only way to survive.
Harmony is messy, brilliant, and funny in the way only depressed people can be. She is driven by a desperate need to create her own version of freedom in a world that insists on her having none.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
The Device takes place entirely within Greenpoint; a Brooklyn neighborhood that inherently carries the visual and thematic contradictions of the story. Once a predominantly Polish, working-class enclave defined by factories, shipyards, and warehouses, Greenpoint has transformed over the last two decades into a patchwork of gentrified coffee shops, boutique apartments and decaying industrial infrastructure. A place where million-dollar condos overlook the most polluted waterway in the country.
A Toxic History
From the mid-1800s to the 1950s, oil refineries along Newtown Creek leaked millions of gallons of petroleum into the soil, forming an underground plume that still seeps into the neighborhood and creek to this day. A permanently contaminated environmental backdrop.
This contrast of grit and opportunity, old and new, industrial hazard and curated aesthetic mirrors Harmony’s psychological landscape. The neighborhood’s dual nature reinforces the themes of the story: hidden histories, concealed threats, and the uneasy competition of nature vs. machine.
Tone & Genre
The Device lives in the uncomfortable space between laughing and wincing. It is a horror film that is frequently funny, and a comedy that is genuinely horrifying, and it refuses to choose between the two because the whole point is that they are the same thing.
The dark humor is not relief from the horror, it is the horror. The fact that the device is cheap and slightly ridiculous, that it looks like a Casio watch had a baby with a Tamagotchi, is a reflection of the stakes. The banality of the surveillance infrastructure, the lo-fi absurdity of the technology used to manage women’s bodies, and the corporate wellness language wrapped around it is funny because it’s believably real, and horrifying for exactly the same reason.
The film’s cinematic DNA draws from the lo-fi rebellious energy of Repo Man, the uncanny domestic horror of Stepford Wives, and the street-level noir intelligence of Chinatown whose message of knowing when to fight and when to let sleeping dogs lie, is the lingering truth of the feature. The tonal register is closest to early Cronenberg in its relationship between the body and technology, and Ducournau’s Titane in its refusal to make the female body comfortable or legible. Harmony is not a scream queen, not a final girl. She is an investigator, a reluctant hero, just someone looking for a place to have a drink in peace.
The body horror is practical, lo-fi, and deliberate. The device looks like something made in 1987 and probably was. Surveillance has never required sophistication. Control has never required elegance. It just requires compliance.
Underneath everything, the film is quietly furious. The fury runs beneath the humor and the horror like the petroleum plume beneath Greenpoint: invisible, permanent, seeping into everything.
The Device exists simultaneously as a feature film in development and as a living, breathing world already in motion. Before a single frame of the feature is shot, the film’s universe is already present in the real world: on walls, on phones, in conversations, in the genuine confusion of people who aren’t sure whether Hera-Tech is a real company.
The Short Film
A proof of concept short film, also titled The Device, is currently in production in the Greenpoint. Directed by Angélique Georges, shot by Damien Paris, and produced by Joseph Mastantuono, the short follows Harmony through a single paranoid night in Greenpoint, culminating in the discovery and extraction of the device. It establishes the film’s world, its tone, its visual language, and its protagonist with enough specificity to make the feature’s ambitions legible to any viewer.
The short is being produced guerilla-style: skeleton crew, available locations, natural light where possible. This is not a limitation. It is a demonstration. The Device is a film about a woman who uses whatever tools she has to push back against systems that were never designed with her in mind, made by a woman using whatever tools she has. The methodology is the argument.
Rather than withholding the short until completion, individual scenes are being released online as they are finished; out of sequence, in short video format, across social media platforms. The fragmented release is intentional: it mirrors Harmony’s own fractured experience of reality, rewards attentive viewers who piece the story together, and builds a community of invested followers before the complete film exists. Once all sequences are shot and edited, the assembled short will be submitted to genre festival circuits in 2027, with primary targets including Fantastic Fest, Fantasia International Film Festival, Sitges, and Gérardmer.
Short Film Sample
The Hera-Tech Campaign
Running parallel to the short film production is a real-world alternate reality campaign built around the film’s fictional antagonist: Hera-Tech, a women’s health technology company whose tagline, Protecting Her Future Health, is the most sinister sentence in the film.
The campaign includes:
A live corporate website at hera-tech.co, presenting Hera-Tech as a legitimate wellness brand with products, branding, and clinical language indistinguishable from the real thing: until you read the fine print.
A fully produced :30 commercial for the Hera-Tech Luna, a sleep-tracking earring marketed to women with the reassuring promise that it learns what your body needs so you don’t have to think about it. The commercial is live on Instagram and has generated consistent public confusion about whether Hera-Tech is real. This is the intended effect.
Printed Hera-Tech stickers, complete with QR code linking to hera-tech.co, placed in dive bar bathrooms throughout Greenpoint, where they sit alongside years of graffiti and bathroom wisdom, indistinguishable from genuine brand placement until something feels slightly wrong.
An active Hera-Tech social media presence seeding corporate wellness content, product announcements, and the kind of aggressively optimistic female-directed marketing language that the film critiques and the audience will eventually recognize as horror.
The Hera-Tech “Luna” Commercial
Why This Strategy?
The Hera-Tech campaign exists because the film’s central argument: that surveillance infrastructure hides in plain sight, normalized by the language of care and optimization is better demonstrated than explained. Every person who genuinely wonders whether Hera-Tech is real is experiencing, in miniature, exactly what Harmony experiences when she discovers the device has been inside her for years without her knowledge. The campaign is not marketing for the film. It is an extension of the film’s world into the real one.
Well before the feature is released, Hera-Tech will have an established presence that the feature can reference, expand, and ultimately expose: a website, a social following, a commercial, a mythology. The audience who has been following Hera-Tech will have been, in a small and entirely consensual way, living inside the film’s premise all along.
Angélique Georges
Writer/Director
Angélique is a French-Australian director based in New York since 2013 with an Emmy Award winning career in Motion Graphics and Visual Effects spanning two decades. She has spent years making other people’s visions look extraordinary – building the visual language of documentary films, television series, and commercial campaigns, giving her an understanding of how motion, sound and images create feeling, convey ideas and close the gap between concept and emotion through sensory engagement.
Having directed short films and animated segments for years, Angelique is now moving her career focus to directing. A born collaborator, she truly enjoys working with a team and empowering her collaborators to have autonomy and take ownership of their work under her vision. The Device is the expression of the themes, genres and concepts that interest her as a filmmaker – bodily autonomy, horror, dark humor and conspiracies delivered with a punk-rock attitude.
Joseph Mastantuono
Producer
Joseph is a producer, colorist, teacher and creator from Bagnères-de-Luchon, France, but has lived in New York since childhood. He most recently produced Our Father, The Devil (Mon Père, le Diable), which has won over 20 awards at various film festivals, including the Audience Award for best narrative feature at Tribeca, and best narrative feature at the New Orleans, Indie Memphis, Heartland, and the American Black Film Festival. It was also nominated for best feature at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards. Joseph also produced 2016’s As You Are, which won the special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year. Joseph teaches post-production and color grading at NYU, and has color graded countless feature films that have played at the largest film festivals in the world. Joseph is also the proud father of three lovely cats.
Damien Paris
Cinematographer
Damien is a longtime screenwriter, director, cinematographer and indie horror master known for his gory, darkly comical, lo-fi horror films, such as Dead Bloom and Sophie Gets A Head. He is also known as the inimitable guitarist of Brooklyn hard rock band The Giraffes. Damien’s eye for gritty, visceral imagery and his instinctive feel for the humor inside the horror makes him the perfect and natural collaborator for this project. When he’s not making films or music he can be found watching anime with his daughter at home in Brooklyn.
Kasey Winters
Editor
Kasey Winters is a New-York based editor with over 10 years of experience working in production and post-production, primarily in commercial film and advertising. She has edited and assisted on campaigns for brands including Oreo, Google, Tide, and Walmart, bringing her collaborative spirit and sense of humor across seven different edit houses, multiple agencies, and directly to clients. Alongside her commercial career, Kasey has always made time for independent passion projects with friends, drawn to creativity, experimentation and collaborative spirit of narrative filmmaking. A lifelong New Yorker, when she’s not working Kasey can usually be found either planning her next trip, reading, or trying to say hello to every dog she passes on the street.
Eglantine
The Production Company
Eglantine is a production company with a focus on resourcefulness, intentionality, and above all – centering the human element. The Device itself will be a practical, handmade prop, imperfect and slightly ridiculous, the locations are my neighborhood, my co-director and cinematographer is my longtime friend. The guerilla methodology is not a compromise, it is the argument. A film about a woman who uses whatever tools she has to push back against systems actively working against her, made by a woman with whatever tools she can gain access to. The camera is small. The streets are free. The fury is real.
